President Bush has asked the US Senate to ratify an international cybercrime treaty. Privacy advocates say the treaty goes too far and will force US ISPs to begin collecting information on their customers. It also bans hate speech, which is constitutionally protected in the US. Only Albania, Croatia, and Estonia have ratified the treaty so far.

AT&T has patented a way to trick spam filters. The technique, which randomly changes a spam message each time it is sent, could be used to thwart collaborative filters like Cloudmark’s SpamNet. AT&T says the patent is purely a defensive measure.

Security firm, Internet Security Systems, says Internet attacks are getting worse, up 26% last quarter. The report also noted that the delay is shrinking between the publication of a flaw and the release of a program to exploit that flaw.

Job losses in the tech sector slowed this year. “Only” 234,000 people lost their job this year, compared to 539,000 last year.

In his Comdex keynote, Kevin Knox, director of business development for AMD, slammed Intel’s Centrino products. The CPU itself is good, he said, but “the wireless technology they bundle with the chip is garbage.”

For the first time ever, AOL has opened its instant messenger to third party developers. Early next year, Macromedia Flash programmers will be able to download a Software Development Kit (SDK) for AIM that will let them write programs that can interact with AIM data (although it doesn’t look like they’ll be able to write a stand-alone AIM client).

The man vs. machine chess tournament ended in a tie yesterday, when World Champion Garry Kasparov agreed to a draw with X3D Fritz. Each had won one game and drawn two in the four game match. There’s no question now that computers are as good at chess as humans, despite Kasparov’s denials.

4 Replies to “Wednesday’s Camouflage”

Actually Leo, that isn’t true. You had to have watched the chess matches to make a statement like that. Kasparov blundered and lost 1 game. He was clearly superior in another where the computer literally played like a child in a “closed pawn” position. The shortcoming is that the computer cannot conjure up “long term plans” like humans and the programmers do not know how to overcome this deficiency (sort of like adding AI to the computer). Kasparov showed clearly that humans still prevail and by a large margin because of the non mathematical thinking involved. The only way in which the computer is superior is that it can not blunder and miscalculate like a human. In general, chess computers are still like calculators, idiots with flawless computing. I’ll take Kasparov any day for the next few years.

I understnad that you and your staff have been Kentucky Colonels. I missed the show about that. A freind just now told me about it. I wish I had been able to see it. I received my comission in 2001 for serving in the Gulf War. I just wanted to say that this is great honor to recive and Iwould like to Congragulate each everyone who received the Honor.

Leo,
Thanks for mentioning SCALE on the show. In addition to TSS regular Chris Dibona we will have talks by Andrew Morton (kernel developer, Matt Asay (novell), Chris Montgomery (Xiph.org / OGG), John Terpstra (SAMBA Developer) and more…. There will also be a FREE screening of Revolution OS at 8pm.
For those who are interested in coming out you can preregister for the show go to our website and use the code “free” for a free pass or “tektv” for 65% off the seminar pass.

Anyone in their mid-20s or younger does not remember an internet not utterly dominated by today’s giant digital platforms. After all, the idea of having a full, unencumbered internet experience without ever needing a Google or Facebook account is pretty much inconceivable now. All ecommerce roads eventually lead back to Amazon. All your online activity […]

A former Nasa engineer spent six months building a glitter bomb trap to trick thieves after some parcels were stolen from his doorstep. The device, hidden in an Apple Homepod box, used four smartphones, a circuit board and 1lb (453g) of glitter.

In a blog post Monday, Google said it would lease a large office building at 550 Washington St. in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood and make it the centerpiece of its new 1.7 million-square-foot Hudson Square Campus. Google plans to invest $1 billion in capital improvements to the campus, which will also include two nearby buildings […]

France said at the start of December it would start taxing Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, the big US technology companies known as GAFA, if European Union finance ministers failed to agree on a bloc-wide digital tax next year.

Charter Communications, the parent company of Spectrum, has agreed to a $174.2 million settlement with Attorney General Barbara Underwood, following the 2017 lawsuit that saw the AG’s office sue the internet provider over misleading internet speeds. The lawsuit, led by then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman alleged that speeds were up to 80 percent slower than advertised.